


something beginning

by lalaietha



Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 23:09:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mina wakes up to pain, the face of the young man named Ben leaning over her, and a pressing need that overrides everything including the pain and wonder that she's alive, and even her ability to choose her words delicately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	something beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [100indecisions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/100indecisions/gifts).



> Written as a treat for Yuletide 2013 for 100indecisions. Note for the uncomfortable body parts of healing at the beginning.

Mina wakes up to pain, the face of the young man named Ben leaning over her, and a pressing need that overrides everything including the pain and wonder that she's alive, and even her ability to choose her words delicately. 

"I desperately need to pi - _ah!_ " she cuts herself off as trying to push herself up leads to stabbing agony in her gut. It's an unbelievably impolite agony and almost embarrasses as much as it hurts, but she manages to hold herself together and not throw up, either. She has never been this badly injured before. She doesn't like it.

The boy, Ben, goes wide eyed and flustered and knocks over the chair at her bedside - oh, she has a bedside, that's probably a good sign - in his haste to get up. 

"Oh shi - ah, no, um, I ca - um - _Gretel?_ " he yells behind him, backing away from Mina and turning towards the door behind him (oh, thinks Mina, we're in a house). "Gretel, she's awake and she says she needs to - " 

With the amount of pain, Mina thinks, as she clutches at her gut, she should be seeing blood on her hand. She isn't. Or feeling much in the way of bandages. Whatever the wound is, it's now definitely closed. 

Answering the boy's frantic call, the witch-hunter ducks under the curtain that's been pinned aside, serving in place of a door, with an empty pot under her arm. Gretel gives Ben a look that Mina can read as impatient and disgusted even in this state and she says says, "Seriously, if you want to do this job, you need to stop panicking. Now get out of here and go finish cleaning up out there." 

The boy flees and Gretel rolls her eyes. "Move over to the edge of the bed," she tells Mina, in a way that walks the line between brisk and brusque, "and here, we'll get your shift out of the way, squat over this. Thought you'd wake up some time today. The kid wasn't being creepy at you, was he?" 

Odd question, Mina thinks distractedly as she tries sitting up more slowly and doesn't find herself wanting to vomit. "Not that I noticed," she says. Mina accepts Gretel's help to the edge of the bed, after she puts the pot down on the floor and comes to sit beside Mina, ducking to put her shoulder under Mina's arm and support her. It helps.

"Good," says Gretel. "Then I don't have to break his arm. I'm working on training him to appropriate fucking behaviour around women." Something about the way she says it makes Mina want to giggle, weakly, and it's a good thing arrangements have been made. 

When she's done, Mina sits back on the bed and then lies back because her stomach _hurts_ , while Gretel throws the contents of the pot out the window. Mina sighs. "Well," she says. "That was embarrassing." 

Gretel shrugs. Her indifference seems genuine. "Notice you're not in the same clothes you got stabbed in? I'd say of the two options, this is the less embarrassing." She leans out the door. "Ben, get your ass over here and take this and wash it out." 

Mina closes her eyes. "I could have lived without knowing that," she says, dryly. With the pain in her side ebbing and the pressure in her bladder gone, she can spare a few thoughts for other things, including - "I'm not dead," she says, a little surprised now that she thinks about it. The last think she remembers is the sickening empty pain of Muriel's wand stabbing into her, and then vague images of Hansel's face and saying something, maybe - and then here. This. Now. 

"Nope." Gretel comes to sit on the end of the bed. She's wearing a different shirt and bodice, but she's still in close-fitting trousers, her hair braided back. There are bruises, fainter and less faint, in different places over her features, and a healing split in her lip, a scabbed over scratch at her scalp. 

She takes something out of one of the sheathes on her array of belts, and Mina finds herself staring at Muriel's wand again. It's a bit of a shock. Her hand goes to the centre of the pain. 

Gretel says, "Between me, this and the magical healing waters," and there Gretel sounds a bit arch, "you didn't actually manage to get all the way to completely dead. Granted," she adds, "if this thing is inherently evil," and she waggles the wand she's holding, "I may have brought you back as some kind of cursed soul doomed to be devoured by dark magic, but our job comes with risks." 

Mina almost gives a soft laugh, before she realizes how bad an idea that would be, in terms of pain. "No," she says. Reassures. "Wands are just wands. If you're quick enough you can make one out of a bundle of sticks on the ground. It just . . . " she waves one hand. "Focuses power. Dark witches just have terrible taste and let themselves be dependent on the kind of magic that needs wands." 

"Well," Gretel says, crossing one leg over the other, "Hansel told me you kept him from dying when Muriel stabbed him. I figured I could give it a shot."

Everything the other woman says is heavy with context and subtext that Mina's not sure she catches, at least not all of it, especially when she talks about Mina saving her brother. It feels tangled and thick with emotions that don't even have names. Between pain and creeping exhaustion that makes her thinking full of fog, Mina decides to worry about that later. "Thank you," she says. 

Gretel shrugs as if brushing off the thanks, like she's uncomfortable with it. "I'm not as good as you," she says. "So it's been about a week, and we weren't sure till last night you were going to pull through." 

"You could be so much better than me," Mina says, thoughtlessly and artlessly. "Now you're so close, I can feel it like lightning coming off you. There aren't very many of us. We try to keep in touch, but it's difficult. We'd heard of you," she goes on, realizing she's babbling but not really able to stop herself, "but we didn't know you were Adriana's children." 

Gretel turns to her with one pointedly raised eyebrow and Mina sighs, hoping she hasn't messed anything up. "Hansel told me, when we were coming to the dark ones' sabbath. But I mostly guessed. I knew whose grotto we were in, when I healed him." 

"Yeah, well. We didn't know either, until we accidentally found our old house, the floor fell in and then Muriel gave us storytime about the Grand White Witch." Gretel's tone is guarded and a little carefully flat. It must be hard, Mina thinks, to adjust. In the stories about the famous witch-hunters, it was always said their parents abandoned them. It's a long time to be angry, Mina thinks, only to learn something new. 

And then thought goes through her brain exactly like lightning and it drives her to sit up again, pain notwithstanding, in a certain kind of terror. " _The book_ ," she cries, "did anyone save the - " 

"The book from Mother's place?" Gretel finishes, stopping her with a hand. "Yeah, it's hidden in the bags. Hansel said it was pretty important. Now lie down, you're going to pop all your stitches and you only stopped bleeding through last night." She pushes Mina's shoulder to make her lie down and Mina tries to breathe around the sudden resurgence of pain. 

"It's priceless," Mina says, almost panting, her head reeling with the relief of knowing it's safe, it's still here. "We thought it burned when they burned your mother. We have other grimoires, hidden here and there, with those of us we think are safest, but this was the most powerful." She rubs her eyes and tries to think how to tell any of the others, whether to tell any of the others. What it means for them. For all of them. She rubs her eyes and for a heartbeat stares at the darkness behind her eyelids. 

 

Mina doesn't realize she'd fallen asleep until she's waking up. It's later, and she's now covered with a blanket; the house is scattered with candles and the light from outside is faint and tinged with orange and red. There's water on an upturned basin beside her bed with a scribbled note of "drink this". She finds, when she sits up and does take a drink, that her side hurts quite a bit less. She puts her hand to the wound - now she can feel the stitches in her skin - and closes her eyes. Touches the edge of the spell that's knitting her back together. It's slow and halting, but it's strong. 

Adriana's daughter. 

She gets up, setting bare feet on a smooth wood floor, and this time looks around properly. 

The room is dim with only two candles, but the house is fairly rich for Augsburg. This is someone's bedroom, complete with rugs on the floor here and there - if a little askew, pulled away from the bed - and tapestry on the walls, with pretty carvings around the shutters. It has a drape instead of a door in the doorway, Mina realizes as she goes towards it, because someone knocked the door down: there are the marks of breaking hinges on the frame. 

She must have made a noise, because Gretel's voice from the other room calls, "It's warmer in here." And it is, when Mina steps through the door into the main room of the house. There's a fire in a decent hearth and even stuffed chairs to sit in. Gretel's in one of them, cleaning a firearm of some kind. She jerks her head towards the other chair. "Might as well come in." 

"Are we alone?" Mina asks, looking around for any other human presence and not finding one, taking in the other side of the room and its little alcove for oven and hearth. Putting the firearm aside, Gretel puts more oil on the cloth and works it into the leather that wraps the handle of a long knife. 

"Hansel and Ben went to get the horses and the supplies, and Edward - the troll - doesn't tend to stick around once it's dark outside." 

"Horses?" Mina asks, blankly. "Who's house are we in? Are we in Augsburg?" 

"In reverse order," says Gretel, "yes, the piece of shit sheriff's, and yeah, horses. Want the whole story, sit down, before you fall down." 

Mina sinks into the other chair, only realizing when she falls the last few inches that her legs aren't all that steady. She's been living alone for long enough, she's gotten used to pushing through that kind of thing and falling when she falls. "Tell me," she says. 

"Apparently," says Gretel, putting aside the rag and oil and picking up a whetstone and spitting on it, "after the fire, the asshole sheriff shot our friend the Mayor in the face. Then he came after me and Hansel." She looks down the blade. "Hansel was with you; they found me. They beat the shit out of me for a while, until Edward noticed and objected." 

"When trolls object to things, people tend to end up splattered all over the landscape," Mina says, when Gretel pauses for a minute, and Gretel smiles in a way that isn't nice. 

"Noticed that," she says. "Anyway. Apparently the piece of shit doesn't have a wife, which was a completely shocking turn of events, let me tell you." 

Mina's mouth twitches. "Oddly enough," she says, "even though they let him terrorize the place, none of the women wanted anything to do with him. But - " she tilts her head. "The Mayor had a wife. What happened to her?"

"Well _apparently_ it's not a good idea," Gretel says, "to summarily shoot in the fucking face the husband of a woman who's related to a bunch of pretty fucking scary guys next town over, including but not limited to _their_ sheriff, their blacksmith, four of their biggest woodcutters, and a guy who's apparently a farmer but still happens to be the size of a brick shithouse. Apparently _she_ rode hell-for-leather to her cousins or brothers or whatever the hell they are, and got back here about the same time as the kids did." 

"And the children told their story," Mina says slowly, guessing. "And then - " 

"Well," Gretel says, sliding the knife into a sheath and tossing it over to a pile of other weapons, presumably similarly prepared and maintained, "by sun-up they'd already found what was left of the sheriff and his cronies out in the woods, which I gather mostly pissed off the brothers-cousins-whatever, because it did them out of beating him to half to death and stringing him up in the village square to finish the job while they watched. With that in mind, his other sycophants kept pretty quiet and people could generally see it wasn't the time to be seen to be on his side. Other town's sheriff came out and found us by our old house, invited us to come back and take over this house while we healed up, and told us the town council had wisely decided to pay the rest of our fee. Nice guy, actually. We're taking the fee in goods. Need horses, a cart, food, all of that shit. When we leave this goes to the Mayor's widow. I think she's planning on burning it and selling the land." 

Mina has only vague memories of the Mayor's wife as a slightly colourless, mousey woman occasionally following in the Mayor's shadow. Apparently she'd misjudged the woman. 

Something twigs at her mind as she digests what Gretel says, and Mina blurts, "I'm sorry." When Gretel looks at her she says, "I kept your brother from finding you for a couple hours. I didn't bother to think it might put you in danger. That was selfish and I apologize." 

Gretel gives her a long look, like she's weighing Mina up. It's uncomfortable; her eyes are searching. Mina had never met Adriana, of course - had been only a young woman when Adriana had been murdered by Augsburg - but she thought Gretel must have got her eyes and her gaze from her mother. 

Then Gretel shrugs, looking to the work she's doing. "You saved his ass twice," she says. "He wouldn't've been much good to me straight out of the tree, and he'd be dead if you hadn't saved him at our old house. Then you saved him from Muriel, he tells me, and got your ass almost killed in the process. I'll call us even." She shrugs again and says, "Besides. Maybe if he'd been there, Edward wouldn't've decided to come to my rescue. Still not sure what he thinks about my brother. Seems to like you and me, though.

"Not to mention," she adds before Mina can respond to that, "my brother's a big boy. It's his job to look out for me. Not yours."

Mina gives a slightly weak smile. "I get the feeling he has the same problem I do," she says, "when it comes to the opposite sex. So I think my distraction probably wasn't fair." 

Gretel actually smiles at that one and says, "Most girls don't like witch-killing stories as pillow-talk," she says. "Unfortunately, my brother doesn't have much else." 

She leans her head on one hand and gives Mina that searching look again, until Mina shifts uncomfortably. Then Gretel says, "You coming with us?" She sits up again. "I know the kid'll whine and probably follow us if we don't take him, and Edward doesn't seem to want to go anywhere. But we're leaving tomorrow and you'll probably still be sore for a while. Wouldn't blame you if you stayed. Might even be able to get some status in the town, the way the Mayor's widow's driving things." 

Mina stares back at her. It's hard to put her answer into words, to cut it down to something that can be said with calm and decorum. In the end she says, "Augsburg almost killed me once for nothing. There's nothing for me here. If you have me, I'll come."

Gretel smiles.


End file.
